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" I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. "

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" I don't really believe in evil at all. "

" My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me. "

" I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists. "

" Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god. "

" I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. "

" What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring. "

" The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy. "

" My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively. "

" Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race. "

" When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work. "

" I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force. "

" The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish. "

" Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater. "

" By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage. "

" I don't hold grudges. "

" It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in. "

" I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building. "

" I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time. "

" You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. "

" Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. "

" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "

" Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you. "

" The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject. "

" I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends. "

" It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now. "

" What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely. "

" At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. "

" True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. "

" A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew. "

" I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar. "